Stuck "Resizing partition"

I am trying to image a Dell OptiPlex 990 with FOG 0.32. I am using the “Single Partition (NTFS Only, Resizable)” option. The system is running Windows 7 64 bit, freshly installed and configured, with a tiny (38 MB seems familiar?) partition then the OS partition filling most of the rest of the disk. There had been a third, Dell recovery, partition in between them which I deleted and then used the Windows CD’s repair process to fix boot stuff and verified I could boot back into the OS. The only thing I’ve changed from stock FOG 0.32 install (on Ubuntu natty) has been to add “acpi=off nomodeset” to FOG_KERNEL_ARGS as was suggested in another thread for the OptiPlex 990 (due to “no chip?” and some other apparently non-critical errors).

PXE boots to the point that it does a resize partition test which is says passed, then hangs on the “Resizing Partition” step. I left it running for over 24 hours before I finally restarted the system and now I get the BIOS splash screen followed by a blank screen with a white cursor blinking in the upper left corner but no text, and it will sit that way indefinitely.

Can anyone tell me why it got stuck on the Resizing Partition step? And is there any way to recover this system I’m trying to image? I can rebuild if necessary, but I’d like to know how to avoid this happening again if I do.

This all makes sense, unfortunately I have already started rebuilding this system. This just gave me a good excuse to do it, but I was already unhappy with the partitioning. Before FOG I was trying MDT and installing onto the third partition of the Dell factory setup, thus the deleting the recovery partition in the middle and the wasted space. I have actually, since the mishap, switched to the latest KitchenSink kernel. So in the end, even if it all works well, there will have been too many variables to say what actually broke last time. Thanks to all for the help.

I think, during the upload process, the boot sector is removed as a preparation step, so this would make sense why you have a blinking cursor. If you have access to a Windows 7 DVD, you can boot to it and attempt to repair your computer. The startup repair wizard should be able to fix this.

If not, you can try going to the command prompt on the DVD and running “bootsect /NT60 C: /force /mbr” that should rebuild the Boot Sector for it. This will allow you to boot back into the PC (you’d have to resysprep it)

To answer your question about the “Resizing Partition” freezing, Joshua’s advice above may be correct, I have yet to have success with uploading a Windows 7 image as a Single Partition. You may also want to consider updating your “Boot Kernel” for Fog by going to “Other Information -> Kernel Updates -> and selecting a new kernel to download and install”

According Blackout in this thread
[url]http://fogproject.org/forum/threads/clone-windows-7-64-bits.9/[/url]
Single Partition mode should work fine for Windows 7, and the NTFS resize probably failed because I didn’t run chkdsk first. I don’t know why my Googling didn’t turn up this relevant thread previously, but thanks for pointing me in the right direction. I’m going to do a multi-disk backup first this time as I’ve tested that to work on one of our Dell servers, so I have a good backup to fall back on if single disk mode goes awry again.